Honestly? Frankly? The “You” to whom I’m writing only lives in my heart and mind. The “You” you are today is years and miles away from the man who upended my life, careened me into new and previously unknown realms, and left me shaking and alone, but ready to be who I needed to be. This exercise in writing “You” a letter isn’t about writing a letter to the actual James.

No, the “You” to whom I’m writing is a kaleidoscopic doppelganger of emotional glassbits that tumble through the scratched lens of my mind’s eye.

It is the “You” I first saw in Barney’s Beanery in December of 1993 in Los Angeles.

It is the “You” who opened up a channel to my future from which spoke a voice alerting me to the unfathomable changes that you’d unleash in my life.

It is the “You” whose gorgeous, simple, heated coarse brutality shocked and completed me so totally, it obliterated every thought of ever desiring anyone but you, ever and ever forever and ever, amen

It is the “You” I adored so completely that I spent hundreds of dollars a month, money I didn’t have, to keep your voice and laughter and despicable beautiful lusts in my head even though we were a continent and an ocean apart.

It is the “You” that, no matter how fleeting our subsequent borrowed times together were, they were enough to sustain me through the years…even through the other relationships…because “I knew in my heart of hearts!” that I was yours, and yours alone, and that some day you would hold this knowledge as surely as I did and you would permit me to love you and yourself to love me the way that Fate intended.

It is the “You” for whom I still struggled to make space, even though I knew it was futile. Some ambertrapped part of me knew…knew…that you would remember who we were.

Today that “You”…those iterations, all of them and more beside…all joined me at once. As I ate my fucking bleu cheeseburger and tried to hold my shit together.

See, today was a rough day. Closing out a convention that had been a bit of a roller-coaster for me. My weekend had been fraught, hormonal issues didn’t help any, and one of the bits of my life that I’d hoped had settled, thereby relieving me of a substantial amount of stress had come undone and I was kind of back to square one.

Today it really hit me in a whole new way, how strange and loopy my life is become. I realized that the next 2 weeks of my life were leading up to some Pretty Big Shit and I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to hold up.

And I was lonely…so lonely.

You know how this is.

The crowd, the people telling you how awesome you are, and still it is so hard…so hard to absorb. I remember how tough it was for you before you gained the degree of notoriety you have today to hang in there when your situation was so discouraging…struggling like so many artists do. I remember one night in Islington as we scraped together pence and pounds to get supper and fags you telling me how you were so grateful and happy that I was there with you, through that rough time. I remember a lot more…but that is for my memory and yours alone.

So it is painful and awful to have so much of these memories blurred and torqued into something less than effulgently fulfilling as I remember the other “You.”

The “You” who reminded me, with a shockingly callus emotional brutality, that my feelings for you weren’t important in light of your “real girlfriends” feelings.

It is the “You” who, after a decade, of my foolish naive hopes, explained that I was not nor would I be, yours.

The “You” who berated me for writing, with pride and passion, about our affair, and how transformational it was.

The “You” who, when his “people” discovered that we were easily linked by a couple of savvy Google searches, called me to insist that it was all inappropriate, and that it should be removed immediately.

It speaks to the still extant desire to please you that coiled, latent, around my heart that my first reaction to this shocking demand was…shame. Shame and sadness and the impulse to say “You’re right, and I am sorry…sorry I spoke. Sorry I wrote. Sorry I am who I am. Sorry that I took this stunning secret me that you unearthed and I polished it and refined it and set it out for all to see and share.

Being submissive and desiring slavery, craving physical and emotional ownership would seem to place me at a disadvantage, relationship-wise

I have to be the one looking to fit into the right “place,” right? I mean, there is the topdominantowner, fully formed and domly and all, needing me to be what THEY need in order to get the fucking equation to balance.

Chameleon, cuttlefish, octopus, me. All my life shifting colour texture shape size and the very fabric of my spirit to be pleasing.

Submission seemed to be just the thing for me. Easy. Natural.

After all, I am an Adept in these skills. It is nothing for me to build emotional dams, aqueducts, sewers and channels so that my emotional slop didn’t muss the hair of my partners. You don’t like that about me? It is gone. Sorry to have bothered you.

Of course, it never works that way. A placid pool, minding its own business, can be thrashed to fury by the mere suggestion of change. I am sure I thought I was handling myself well, damming up my emotions and kneeling and serving and trying, trying so hard, to be perfect.

But I seeped through the cracks. My very transparency gave lie to my struggle.

And when that didn’t work out, I was told I wasn’t “slave material.”

That I lacked the “heart of a slave.”

Which is a pretty shitty thing to hear because, Ganesha knows, it took years to get to the place where I could even acknowledge who I felt I was. To have spiritual insurgents in my heart conquer my city and then find it lacking was more than devastating.

It was killing.

The problem with the Henry Higgenses of the BDSM community is this: We Eliza Doolittles step up to the plate. We lose our flavor, willingly slaughter our ego, suppress our id. We talk pretty one day, and we have the spit-shine and the downcast eye.

And then, we outshine you. We have outgrown you.

And you have no fucking idea how to use us.

Your assumption that you have the capacity to MAKE US WHO YOU WANT US TO BE is fucking hubris.

Hubristic and damaging.

And we let you do it.

I let you do it.

I don’t know how long it will be, if ever, that I find the worthy person who, when they look at me, really see me and understand who I am, and not only that, are convicted that I am who they must have in their lives.

I’ve spent many years making myself ready to prove myself to the right person.

But I recently realized that I have no control over what people want. I don’t even have control over how people see me. Sure, I can set up smoke, mirrors, costumes, masks, curtains and soundtracks to keep up my desperate duplicitous dance.

Love me love me love me but please do that from over there. DO NOT get too close, because then you’ll see me for what I really am and THAT Mollena can’t bear any but the softest touch. She isn’t tough. She isn’t strong. She isn’t confidant and she needs more love than I trust you to give her so back the fuck off and leave us alone.

Next show at 10:00.

My relationships have been based on compromises. Some massive. But sometimes, a series of seemingly small compromises. And frankly, that was OK. Because they met some or most of needs.

Maybe I wasn’t your ideal physical type. But you liked me anyway. Sure I may be too heavy to get your dick hard, but I was also a heavy masochist and that got you hard, and I was proud to be able to take that. And that was enough.

Maybe you really didn’t want to date someone as twisted and perverted as I was, and you judged me deeply. But my nature meant you could do anything to me you wanted, and I was essentially obedient, and that was endlessly fascinating to you. And that was enough.

Maybe you relished the unnerving instantaneous bond that we immediately felt, but distance and your “Real” relationship would never permit that to blossom. Yet it was pleasing to you to let that fire smoulder , with occasional stoking with stolen phone calls and the grandest larceny of all: giving me hope that one day, you would change your mind. If music be the food of love, you fed me so over a decade. And that was enough.

Maybe I was not suited to the type of service you were convinced you needed, but you were patient and would teach me to silence my needs and my wants and my spirit and my fire and be the silent invisible slave you sought to adorn your stable. And I was giving up myself for you. And that was enough.

And throughout all of that what I sit with now is a battered steamer trunk of memento mori, and maudlin yet meaningful memories.

I had had that trunk under control, I thought. And I had left mostly silent the whispering submissive, craving ownership, craving a place, wanting to be seen for who I am and accepted.

But of late that has been kind of fucked up. Ganesha, remover of obstacles, put me into a situation, in a time and a place where my defences folded like night flowers at sunrise.

I can’t sit on top of it any more. Those previously dormant emotions and feelings are chattering and clawing and dinging cracks through which they can escape.

They have quite a bit to say.

And I can only sit and listen. To my own desires. My own fears. And I have nowhere to escape. Alcohol’s oblivion isn’t available. Running away to dilute my pain with the pain of others isn’t appealing either.

Listening. Listening to myself. Scared because I rarely know what I am going to hear.

But it is not painful, listening to my desires, my needs.

Noisy. Gods yes, noisy, yes. Many many voices. Many fingers hands, many eyes blinking in the new light. Many voices finding themselves.

My desires and fears are hungry. Starved, really, and they want to be fed, please.

Whenever you get the chance, but please, don’t let us die.

I don’t want them to die. I want to be all of me. And I now know, and I accept, that I cannot do that alone.

As much as I’ve had pounded, beaten and etched into my psyche that I HAD TO BE independent, that I could never rely on anyone, that people are only human and WILL disappoint you, I have to be OK with that.

That emotion, that desire, that longing, is NECESSARY.

How else will you feel the quicksilvershaprmess of that desire being fulfilled if you don’t fucking let it breathe and speak its name?

Pain is to be felt. That is what it is there for. Avoid pain at your own peril.

Part of who I am…a substantial part of who I am…doesn’t thrive unless it is in concert with another.

I cannot be the performer I am unless I have collaborators, an audience, a director.

I cannot be the writer I am unless I have readers, people who can hear me, and support me.

I cannot be the bottom, submissive, slave, girl I need to be until I risk, again and again and fucking again, if necessary, putting myself in front of the oncoming train of my emotional process so that I can feel the impact and absorb that energy.

The most precious expensive, rare and dear things on earth aren’t for everyone. They are often volatile, often hard to find and even more difficult to keep.

I am not suitable for most people.

But rather than assuming that this lowers my value and that this is my fault and I need to stoop to be conquered, I think I am going to try this new thing.

From 69Stories: One Pervert’s Tale: It was/is an autobiographical telling of bits of my life. None of it is slanderous, libelous, OR untrue These are the facts as I remember them and are retold with joy, and with fond recollection.

Mostly ;-)

FALLING

Falling is something we usually associate with awkwardness, a loss of coordination. Scraped knees, a twisted wrist.

How interesting, then, that we refer to the emotional process of discovering intense feelings of affection and adoration to be “falling in love” it implies awkwardness, a loss of control, and imminent danger. I try to avoid it. Who needs it! Complicated mass of conflicting emotional hairballs. Nine times out of ten you can see it coming and take steps to avoid it.

But sometimes, the fall comes from no where. Smooth sailing, clear path you’ve gone down a thousand times before and the level floor reaches up and grabs you. There’s no defense against that. No amount of denial, defensiveness or dissembling is going to take the wallop out of that fall.

After a series of stumbles and near misses, I’d had enough. I forswore my days of sexual excess, and was firmly committed to keeping myself out of trouble.

HE was trouble from the first moment. The first feature of his that I became acquainted with was his ass.

Well, he was playing pool with a group of men at Barney’s Beanery in Hollywood. I was with two girlfriends, Lori and Anne, and we were seated in a booth next to the pool table area. It was cramped. The players had to practically enter the booths to take long table shots. I wasn’t entirely peeved when a fantastic specimen of male posteriorhood was presented to my gaze. Absolutely the finest ass I have ever seen on a white guy. I tapped it with my finger.

Oo! Nice!

Its owner turned, startled, then smiled at me.

“Excuse me, but we’re trying to eat over here, do you mind not putting your butt on our table?”

Eventually I worked up the nerve to invite him over to our table. His friends were hollering and applauding as he sat in our booth. Within five minutes I’d learned that He was a musician, was in LA on tour for a week or so, then he was flying up to San Francisco for another week and a half. He also had a girlfriend back home. And he played guitar and sang. I wondered why he felt compelled to tell me he had a girlfriend. I mean, he was only in LA for a week. And we had just met.

Whatever!

I asked him where he was going to be performing. He wasn’t sure, so he asked one of the Irish dudes at the other table. The guy pulls out a huge, and I mean fat freaking binder and flips through it…they were at the Shrine Auditorium that Tuesday.

I cracked the fuck up.

“I have never heard of you. The Shrine Auditorium is where they hold, like, the Academy awards and shit.”

He explained it was not his gig, he was playing backup for another guy. He asked me if I’d heard of Van Morrison.

“Um, yeah I have heard of him. So, you are touring with Van Morrison, right?” I asked him if he could get tickets for my friends and me. He said he didn’t think that would be a problem. Frankly, I had my doubts about the whole story. Furthermore, I will confess to not be being a huge Van Morrison fan. But that didn’t really matter. This wasn’t about anyone but Him and me.

The evening flew and I found I couldn’t stand to be away from Him. He’d look at me with this sly sort of grin and I’d giggle. He’d touch my arm or knee and I’d sweat. I was out of control. Helpless. He knew it. He felt it and there was nothing to be done to stop it.

He invited me back to his hotel, where he and his mates were going to continue partying. I’d have followed him anywhere, but my car was in fucking Pasadena and my girlfriends were less than supportive of my desire to trot off with this stranger. We exchanged numbers and promises to get together the following afternoon…

I reached to shake his hand and he laughed, grabbing my wrist and pulling me towards him his hands in my hair on either side of my face looking into my eyes and leaning down to kiss me what…now I cant breathe…my entire body…compressed…tight…hot…alive…numb and frozen…

He was a really good kisser.

I didn’t sleep. As soon as was feasible in the morning, I called my friends. I rescheduled my therapy appointment. In a panic, I told her what had happened and that I had to …I don’t know. Something was happening.

She was surprisingly calm.

“I’ll be here when you are done, do what you need to go. Call me.”

Huh.

I talked to my Boss…just in case…I needed a few days off.

I wondered what the fuck was happening. I felt my life split in front of me. I could back out and take the path I was on, to whatever that would be. Or.

Or I could get on board this other ride that plummeted over an edge outside of my vision. I’d never in my life had a clearer moment of choice.

But there wasn’t ever a question.

Not really.
I picked Him up in front of His Hotel, and we cruised down Melrose Avenue to my favorite bar, the SnakePit. This was, of course, for show. What I really wanted was to turn around and go back to his hotel room immediately, but I had only just committed to curbing my promiscuity! I thought about it.

“Look, I’ll feel really slutty if we go right back to your hotel room after our first date. Um…how about this. We can go to two more bars, then it will be like our third date, and then we can fuck. How’s that?”

He was amenable, and so off we went. We drove over to The Cat and Fiddle. Listened to some Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on the juke.

A couple rounds later, it was back in to my old ass Honda Accord, Set. I chauffeured Him to The Burgundy room

It wasn’t long there. We were going to be 86ed if we kept up our lascivious behaviour at the bar. He didn’t seem to care that people stared. He gazed at me with unnerving clarity and delight. His breath smoky, his smile bright his hands on my ass my hips my waist under my breast my neck…he would lean in and whisper and my entire nervous system would overload and I would be on the brink of orgasm, breath shallow and huffing past parted lips eyes wide and unblinking as I stared back at him trying to catch, in his dark green eyes, a trace of what it was he saw in me.

“God you are so fucking gorgeous….you have no idea what I’m going to do to you, love…”

He was right. I didn’t. I’m not sure he really knew, either. Not really.

We left Burgundy room and I floored it back to the Sunset Marquis. We ran through the lobby and up to a pair of double French doors which suddenly swung open towards us and we almost collided with a stout short man, a bottle of brandy in one fist and the hand of a girl in the other. My Date smiled and told me he’d like to introduce me to his boss. My eyes widened slightly.

“Oh! Hi, Mr. Morrison. Van, Van it is then!”

OK, jaded or not, this is Pretty Fucking Cool.

It was less fucking cool when we got back up to My Date’s huge suite, and Van decided to stick around for a while. We drank brandy while He and Van did horrific things to the lyrics of Brown Eyed Girl. I chatted with the girl, who turned out to be the younger sister to the lead singer of the Pogues. She was amused I dug them. Unlike her brother, she had a beautiful smile.

The minutes stretched hours. I pondered the irony. I mean, here I was in the presence of a musical legend! Lots of people would give their right arm to be here!! And all I could do was wish he’d leave so that I could screw his guitarist. Feh.

And I had to pee.

By the time I left the luxuriously appointed bathroom, I had decided to just make the best of things and relax a bit…enjoy the ride!